About This Blog

The UK Web Focus Daily blog was set up in 2011 to provide my open scrapbook of jotting, ideas, etc. I'd prefer it if posts on this blog were not publicised or linked. Comments can be provided, though please note that the ideas are in early stages and arguments will not be fully formed.
These jottings may inform the publication of posts on my main blog, the UK Web Focus blog.
Note that I reserve the right to delete posts, make posts private or switch off comments to this blog.

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A recent post in the Guardian technology blog provided the information that “Shazam hopes Friends will spark a social revolution“. The post#’s byline summarised the article: “Users can now link their Shazam profile to Facebook and browse a real-time feed of the songs their friends tag“. Shazam are not the first music site to provide such a facility – as the post describes “Apple is onto a similar thing with its Ping social network“. But the article goes on to add that Apple’s approach “has received distinctly mixed reviews since its debut last year – not least because it does not integrate with Facebook at all“.

Would a lack of Facebook integration provide a barrier to the deployment of social services provides on institutional Web sites, I wonder?

The WordPress software appears to be able to provide a rich platform for evaluating the potential of various new developments. On UKOLN’s WordPress platform we have recently installed a number of plugins which we will use to evaluate various aspects of Linked Data and related developments.

wp-RDFa brings the Semantic Web to your WordPress blog. Currently this plugin supports FOAF and the Dublin Core.

FOAF is Friend of a Friend, and can be used to relate your personal information to your blog. It can also be used to relate other users of your blog to you building up a semantic map of your relationships in the online world.

wp-RDFa uses the Dublin Core markup to tag posts with the title, creator and date elements.

However the initial experiment resulted in the title of each post being replicated, with a spurious “<:” being displayed on one blog but not on another. Perhaps the bug is related to the theme used? However disabling the “Enable inline dublin core elements” option removed this problem.

Of more concern, however, seems to be the personal information which the FOAF file contains. It includes the names of colleagues at UKOLN, perhaps those who have accounts on our blog server, but also other names of people who I do not think are associated with the blog (i.e. I don’t think have provided a comment). Hmm, what are the privacy implications of using a plugin such as this?

Brands and businesses are looking for ways to leverage Facebook’s recently unveiled Questions tool in ways that differ from what they’re already doing on Q&A sites such as Quora, Yahoo Answers and LocalMind.

This new feature, which functions as a recommendation engine, was rolled out to all users on March 24. According to Ben Grossman, communication strategist for marketing agency Oxford Communications “It also presents a major opportunity for businesses to conduct market research and crowdsource in a far more elegant way than was previously possible“.

Will institutions start to use this service to carry out market research, I wonder?

A recent tweet from Karen Blakeman alerted me to a post which asked “Is Facebook Killing Off The Company Website?“. This post discussed evidence that Web traffic sot large commercial companies such as Coca Cola is dropping whilst traffic to their Facebook pages is growing. Hmm – might something similar happen to institutional Web sites, I wonder? Especially, as I suggested yesterday, if Facebook pages become part of a global Web of Linked Data.

An article entitled “”Empty Buckets or Pure Gold” in the Times Higher Education (17 March 2011) describes differing positions on open access repositories. It was interesting to note that Neil Jacobs comments on “considerable activity around some repositories” mentioned the University of Glasgow which “records 20,000 downloads per month“. We hear criticisms of use of simple metrics such as downloads, but when it comes to evidence which is published in newspapers such figures are used.

We are now seeing a lot of such tweets, with speakers at event freely sharing slides use in their talks. I think this is an example of one aspect of the provision of open (educational?) resources – making the resources available online and promoting them. Of course the slides themselves may not be licensed for reuse – and slides are not necessarily educational resources. But I think seeing creators of a resource being willing to facilitate access to their resources is an important part of the process of openness.

Earlier today Amazon announced the launch of their App Store for Android Phones. I installed the app on my HTC Desire and tried to install my first app (Angry Birds, which is free for the day) – but it didn’t work as it seems that paying for a (free!) app is not yet available in the UK.

Despite this minor glitch there do seem to be an increasing number of app stores being developed, starting with Apple’s iTunes App Store which was followed by their Macintosh App Store. In addition to Amazon’s offering I read recently that Opera Opens Cross Platform Mobile App Store and, of course, Microsoft also intend to join in (with Apple complicating matters having claimed rights to the name ‘app store’).

But if app stores take off as a simple way of installing new applications on mobile devices and desktop computers where will this leave universities? If you wish students to install an app to access a VLE or student portal, will it have to be approved by the owner of th app store? And if this approach isn’t taken, won’t installing apps appear cumbersome to end users?

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.

It seems to be supported by a number of well-known companies including YouTube, Flickr, and Vimeo. But is it an “open standard”? Note that further information is available from the following resources: